I Built a Local News Website • Thomas McGee<br>searchlight_modedark_modeFree Resources

DesignI Built a Local News Website<br>June 3, 2026By Thomas McGee

Around six years ago, I moved to Boise, Idaho. It just so happened to be right about the time COVID was starting to shut down the nation and the world, more strictly in some places, more loosely in others. It was a strange time to move anywhere, but it was an especially strange time to move from the only region I had really known into a place that felt completely unfamiliar.

I had spent the vast majority of my life in Western Washington. I was used to Mount Rainier, evergreen trees, gray skies, and rain that seemed to exist less as a weather event and more as a permanent condition of life. I knew where everything was. I knew the coffee shops, the stores, the back roads, the highways, and the places you only know about because you grew up near them or got lost there enough times to remember. I could get to downtown Seattle without thinking about it, and I could find my way to random little towns up north, including strange little places like Point Roberts, which feels like the kind of place only a handful of people know exists.

Then I moved to Boise, and almost immediately realized how much I had taken that familiarity for granted.

Boise is beautiful, but it is beautiful in a very different way than Western Washington. It is drier, warmer, and a whole lot browner, at least when you first arrive and are still mentally comparing everything to cedar trees and moss. There are mountains and trails and plenty of beautiful places to explore, especially once you get out of the city and into the more rugged parts of Idaho, but it took time for that landscape to register with me. At first, I mostly felt like a fish out of water.

That feeling was amplified by the timing. Because of COVID, moving to a new place did not come with the normal rhythm of exploring restaurants, wandering into coffee shops, going to events, meeting people, and slowly becoming familiar with the area. Everything was filtered through closures, uncertainty, and the general weirdness of that period. So even after I had technically moved, it took a while before I felt like I had really arrived.

Once things started returning to normal, or at least whatever version of normal we were all trying to piece back together, the feeling became more obvious: I had no idea what anything was here. I did not know what there was to do. I did not know which coffee shops were good. I did not know which trails people liked. I did not know where to go on a Saturday morning, which restaurants people were excited about, or where locals went when they wanted to get out of town for the day.

So I did what most people do. I searched around online. I poked through Google Maps. I tried things at random. Somewhere along the way, I also picked up traditional archery, which has been a lot of fun, especially in a state like Idaho where there is so much public land and so many places to get outside. I even started a small archery channel called Lens & Arrow and posted things like trying an English longbow as a thumb draw archer, because apparently my hobbies have a tendency to turn into websites, videos, or both.

But in the middle of all that exploring, I noticed something interesting. When I wanted to understand what was actually happening around Boise, the first place I thought to look was local news. That seems obvious enough. If you are new to a city and want to know what is happening in that city, local news should be the place to go.

The problem was that most of what I found did not really feel like the Boise I was trying to get to know.

Local News That Doesn’t Feel Local

This is not meant as a hit piece on local journalism. Local news is expensive to produce, journalism is not cheap, and there is real value in knowing about road closures, city decisions, public safety issues, elections, crime, weather, and everything else that falls under the traditional umbrella of local coverage. I am not saying those things do not matter. They do.

But there is a difference between “this happened in Boise” and “this is what it feels like to live in Boise.”

That is the gap I kept noticing. If you talked to someone who lived here, the conversation usually was not about the same things that appeared on local news sites. People were talking about which hot spring they wanted to visit over the weekend. They were talking about floating the Boise River. They were talking about a new restaurant downtown, a coffee shop they liked, a concert coming up, a farmers market, a trail, a bakery, or some weird little place they discovered while driving through Idaho.

On social media, you could find more of that. You could find someone posting a selfie video from a new Indian restaurant. You could find a local creator talking about a hike. You could find someone showing off a hotel, a hidden spot, a coffee shop, or a weekend event. In some ways,...